The Suspicious Return of The Daily Capper

If you’ve been following our coverage of Amanda Todd’s suicide, you'll know that it led to a realisation that there is a very active corner of the internet where paedophiles find young girls on webcam chat sites like BlogTV, coerce them into taking their clothes off, screenshot their images clandestinely and share the screen-caps with each other in a sick bartering system that leads to rivalries among their ranks. Once you understand this network of predators, it's clear that the cause of Amanda’s death is wrapped in a dizzying and upsetting online world. One of the most perverse and alarming elements of this subculture is an animated newscast series called The Daily Capper, which covers the exploits and stories that develop inside this playground for pedophiles. This Saturday, The Daily Capper released its first video since Halloween of 2011 (embedded above), which claims to unravel the mystery behind Amanda's blackmail. The tone that this newscast takes is severely different from any other video that The Daily Capper has released previously.

In this video, the animated newscaster who had previously revelled in the dark activities of cappers by providing them with awards for blackmailing or warning of FBI monitoring on BlogTV, opens by taking a moral high ground against Canada's law enforcement and the mainstream media. The newscaster opens by declaring that Amanda Todd’s suicide is more than a case of cyber-bullying, which is what I reported weeks ago (since then, this narrative has become the popular understanding in Canada's mainstream media). The video goes on to reveal a timeline of events that starts with Amanda flashing on BlogTV, moves on to screenshots of paedophiles sharing her live chat link on BlogTV and then reveals emails sent to The Daily Capper, supposedly from Amanda, that asked for the newscast's help in exposing her harassers. The video also attempts to verify that Kody Maxson, the man the upstart New Jersey branch of Anonymous outed as her blackmailer, was in fact the man responsible for harrassing her. However, given what we know about the ongoing rivalries between cappers and the sick nature of what they do, it's impossible to trust The Daily Capper when they say that Kody is more guilty than Viper, the paedophile whom Kody has blamed in the press.

While it’s all well and good to release a video like this a full month after Amanda committed suicide, and almost two years after her blackmail took place, it is extremely unsettling that the producer of this video had been sitting on information, emails, chat logs, images and videos that all detail the timeline and events behind the blackmail and torment of Amanda Todd. If the producer of this video does have heroic intentions, why would he keep this information private until well after blackmailers caused the death of a young girl? And why is the moralising tone of this video completely different than that of any other video that The Daily Capper has published?

Sure, some new information has been released in this video (it appears to capture the exact moment when Amanda’s blackmail began, which could be very helpful to law enforcement), but it also appears to be an attempt by those in the capper world to protect the dangerous community that they have developed by pretending to care about the people they hurt. The Daily Capper has previously found joy and excitement in documenting the exploits of paedophiles, so their pleas to prosecute someone in this one specific, high-profile case should be taken with several large handfuls of salt. Hopefully the information provided in the chatlogs that The Daily Capper has held on to for nearly two years can help the police bring her tormenters to justice. That said, given the lack of arrests or public statements from Canadian law enforcement regarding the connection between the capping world and Amanda's death, it's hard to say that any such justice is forthcoming.